The beard smiled. “Good eggs this morning, Judy.”
“What are you talking about?! I’ve got the best cook in the world. Buenos huevos every morning, oui?” Judy turned her attention back to me as she led me out to the patio through the kitchen.
Rather than hiding from the world like I did, Judy was constantly seeking a connection with people. Silence that was the soundtrack of my life was as intolerable to Judy as an empty coffee cup. She scurried about refilling sturdy mugs with coffee and dead air with chatter. I was amazed at how comfortable she seemed at having all eyes on her while I could barely keep from blushing from just her attention.
“Do you want to see where Whoopi signed my wall?” Judy asked.
The Big Kitchen was like a huge game of connect-the-dots, from the people in the photos, to the celebrity graffiti, feminist posters, to the bizarre painting of the restaurant without its roof and children playing with it as a dollhouse. Trying to piece together what it all meant seemed futile, compelling, and oddly comforting. The smell of sizzling bacon, coffee, and something buttery sweet was beyond compelling.
“Um, okay,” I said, game.
None of the cooks seemed especially surprised to see Judy taking a customer through the kitchen. High on a dingy yellow wall, Whoopi Goldberg demanded in black Sharpie pen, “Don’t paint over my spot, goddamn it!”
“Why did Whoopi Goldberg write that on your wall?” I asked.
Judy smiled, raised her eyebrows, and peered at me over her down-tilted wire-rim glasses. “She didn’t want me to paint over her spot,” she said slowly, as though I should have read more into her answer than I could. “And she felt pretty strongly about it.” When Greta arrived, she gave me a bit of background on the Big Kitchen. Not only did she swear the place had the best biscuits and gravy she’d ever tasted, but that Judy was something of a political entertainment muse. Whoopi Goldberg worked there as a dishwasher while she was homeless in San Diego. Sheri Glaser, another performance artist, also did time as a waitress at the Big Kitchen. Lily Tomlin and Pat Schroeder came to the phone personally when Judy Forman called. She led the sage burners to the convention center after the GOP convention, then called the media for film at eleven.
“What has you distraught?” Greta finally inquired after our meals had been delivered.
“I’m not. I’m thrilled, actually. I quit my job,” I said, recharged and remembering my impulsive move.
Greta took a deep breath, signaling that she was trying to not react. She placed her fingers against the edge of the table gently, as though she were about to play piano. She leaned in and smiled. “Tell me everything. How did this come about? Do you have a plan for what you’re going to do next?”
“I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do,” I began. “This happened so suddenly. Larry started talking about a buyout option, and two hours later I’m here taking a few vacation days, and Monday I start my two-week transition out the door and on to I don’t know what. I do know one thing for sure, though.” I paused for dramatic effect. It was so rare I had news to report, much less a life-altering announcement.
Grandiose announcements were made every Monday morning at our office break room. Nancy once went to a weekend workshop to reprogram her attraction to abusive men. Fred announced he was an alcoholic and attended his first AA meeting after he woke up on a bench in Balboa Park one Sunday morning. And most recently, Sandy announced that she got married by Elvis in Vegas. I’d seen plenty of the dramatic pause; I just never had a use for one before.
Pause. “I know one thing and this is it. Are you ready to hear my news?” I asked, straightening my back and leaning in as if I had the biggest news in the world.
“By next Christmas I am going to be blissfully and disgustingly happily married to Adam Ziegler.”
The skin on Greta’s face dropped two inches. My announcement was like emotional Botox. I had no idea what she was thinking. The look of anticipation was replaced by one of vacancy.
“Surprised?” I tried to resuscitate the giddiness we shared ten seconds prior to the words Adam Ziegler coming from my mouth.
“Who the hell is Adam Ziegler?” she asked with annoyance and not an ounce of actual curiosity. “Before I moved back to San Diego, I specifically asked you if you were dating anyone and you said you weren’t.”
Out of sheer stupidity, I tried again to revive the excitement. “We’re not officially dating, but we’ve known each other for seven years, and I pretty much knew the moment I met him that he was
the
one, but I never had the guts to do anything about it. Now, I feel like I’ve got this second lease on life and I want to start a relationship with him. You know, get out there and take the bull by the horns?”
Greta was silent for a few seconds, then sighed pityingly. “I completely support the idea of taking life by the horns, but that doesn’t translate to marrying some guy you barely know. Mona, you have an opportunity to discover who you are and what you want from life, and all you could come up with was marrying your puppy crush? You have the time and the money to do absolutely anything, Mona. I hate to say this, but you’re a good enough friend that I will. This adolescent fantasy of yours is more than a smidge uninspired. You should be taking painting lessons in Paris, going to therapy, doing social work. Something,
anything
other than attaching your happiness to marriage to some guy you hardly know.”
The air left the room, which is difficult to do on an outside patio.
“Oh,” was all I could say. “I was—I am—excited about this, to tell you the truth.” I hoped she felt guilty for deflating me, but she didn’t react. “I’ve been to Paris, I don’t need therapy, and I’m not the most social person in case you haven’t noticed. And I
do
know Adam. I’ve known him for years.”
Greta snorted and rolled her eyes.
“I have known him for years!” I snapped.
“It’s not that,” Great retreated.
“Then what?”
“Mona, don’t take this the wrong way, but if anyone needs therapy, it’s you. You’ve been through a lot. I still can’t believe Caroline never sent you to a therapist after you came to Coronado.”
We each used the next ten minutes of silence to eat. With each chew, I started to grow more annoyed with Greta’s immediate condemnation of my plan. “I know I have a lot of choices, which I think really validates whichever one I make,” I began. “I’m not getting married to Adam because I need someone to support me, or because I’m pregnant. I want to marry him because I think being with someone as wonderful as him will make me happy.”
Greta dropped her expression and her fork at the same time. “Grow up, Mona,” she exasperated. “Why don’t you try making yourself happy first, then see if you still feel the need to marry a stranger. I try very hard to refrain from treating my friends like patients, but in cases where I see a friend on a collision course, I need to step in and say something.” Greta gasped as she realized her poor choice of words. “Mona, I am so sorry. What a horribly insensitive comment. I am so, so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, insulted that she assumed I was so fragile that the reference would break me. “Stop apologizing, Greta. It’s fine.”
The first sounds I heard were the clattering of kitchen pans and dishes, and the sounds of adults talking. My mother laughed and teasingly scolded my father for something I’ll never know. His quick retort earned an uproarious laugh from the rest. “Go wake up the kids, Mr. Hilarious,” she ordered. “Come on, Andy, I’m serious. We’ve got an hour to hit the road, and no one’s even out of bed yet.”
“S’Mona coming?” asked one of the guys. Freddy, I think.
My mother answered, “Her temp was normal last night, but we’ll see how she feels. Andy, wake the rest of the kids and I’ll check on Mona. Fran, you still okay with staying behind? I can stay back if you want to go.”
Francesca was legally only the grandmother of Leah, Maya, and Karah, but as the only person living in our house who had crossed the sixty-year mark, she was a surrogate grandmother to us all. She was the attending midwife for the six youngest kids in the house, including my two brothers. Francesca was the one we all went to first when we skinned a knee or got sick. So she was the natural choice to stay behind and take care of me that day.
“Don’t be silly, Laura,” Francesca assured my mother. “We’ll be fine here. I think she needs one good day of rest, and with you all gone, she’ll kick this thing and be good as new.”
The truth was that I had already kicked it two days earlier, but enjoyed the solitude the flu had afforded me. I loved my humongous patchwork family, of course, but in a full house like ours, there was rarely a moment of silence. Never a minute to just sit and think before some little kid would whiz past yammering about who knows what. Hardly a second to just perch myself at the window and daydream about what I wanted to do with my life. Barely time to be one person. There were so many of us under one roof, it was impossible to hear one’s own thoughts.
We were peaceful people living in a house of perpetual chaos. It is tempting to try to rewrite history now, and idealize life on the commune. Glorifying the dead and the life I lost seems to be the virtuous thing to do. As virtuous as dishonesty can be, that is. I remember hearing the adults talk about how disingenuous it was when people eulogized the deceased as though they were saints or living sages. How every thought the person had ever uttered suddenly became prophecy. I remember Asia saying that when she died, she wanted to be remembered “true and real,” for who and what she was, good and bad. “May my tombstone have many chips,” she said, raising her glass of red wine one evening. “A life well-lived is a life filled with mistakes and stupid shit you should’ve never done.” The rest of the family toasted her for this pearl of wisdom, which, in the height of irony, was Asia’s final prophecy. I tried to remember life in Montana as it really was, not to reproduce it in my mind as a blissful childhood singing “Kumbaya” with my soul sisters. How I wish they gave me permission for such honesty while they were alive.
Even as a teen—the time of separation from one’s parents—I felt extremely guilty about not appreciating this “paradise” the adults created for us. My only consolation was that my best friend Jessica shared my antipathy for commune life. We rolled our eyes and charaded a finger-down-the-throat during the Womyn’s Forest Walks where the moms and younger girls sang “Siyahamba” in three-part harmony. Jess nearly died of embarrassment when her mother hosted a “Red Party” when she got her first period. All of the women and girls blew some goofy hollow animal tusk and shouted these crazy guttural chants at the full moon. The men served us all tea and fruit bars they actually baked, and kept calling us Goddess Jessica, Goddess Mona, Goddess So and So. When I think of it now, their baking for us really was kind of sweet. Really. I don’t just want it to be sweet, it really was. At thirty years old, I can see this with greater ease than I could as a teenager trapped on a commune.
As Jessica and I churned the compost, we fantasized about what it would be like to live with normal families. We’d never met any mainstream families, and we didn’t own a television so the Cosbys were strangers to us, but somehow we knew they were out there. Our parents acknowledged the people of “Babylon” (which Jessica and I actually thought was somewhere in Montana) with thinly masked disdain. They valued things instead of people, my mother told us. They had become a culture of disposability, said Freddy. They were out of touch with their human capabilities, said Asia. They watched too much television, Morgan said. Francesca was the only one who’d interrupt these self-righteous tirades with, “Oh, let them be. You chose your lifestyle, now be happy and live it.” I always took great comfort when Francesca piped in with these comments, because it showed that our parents weren’t always right. Someone older and wiser could—and did—chide them for judging others. She never knew it, but Francesca always equalized the ever-present, taxing guilt I felt about desperately wanting to take a field trip to Babylon, not to attend a nuclear disarmament rally, but to go to the mall, flirt with boys who watched TV, and drink half of an Orange Julius from a Styrofoam cup.
The night I spiked a fever of 104 degrees, guilt was the furthest thing from my mind, though. I felt only a shivering, painful delirium with spoonfuls of joy about getting to sleep in my very own room. Normally, I slept in a large dorm room shared with other kids from age four-to-Todd, the wavy-haired seventeen-year-old son of Asia and Morgan. The babies slept with their parents until they were weaned, which was just fine by the three of us teenagers. We heard enough sniffling, moaning, and giggling as it was. My father and Freddy built bunk beds for the boys, and for some reason, all of us girls had futons on the floor. On the ceiling was a sky blue, sheet-thin tapestry with cotton clouds that my mother made after our first year in Montana. When she tacked it to the bedroom ceiling, the sheet billowed down, creating a soft illusion of natural sky. My mother said ceilings were oppressive. She even wove threads of gold subtly into the sheet so in the daylight it looked like the thinnest rays of sunshine. For the four days I was sick, I got to stay in my very own room, which was really the sewing room, but I didn’t care. It was such a luxury to spend my days in absolute silence that I decided to extend my illness for just a little longer.
“So what are we going to do today, Miss Camille?” Francesca asked after the school bus filled with anti-nuke protestors had pulled out of our driveway.
I smiled at the reference to the film.
“We have time to braid your hair if you still want,” Francesca offered. I nodded, went upstairs to grab my brush, and returned with a skip. It was liberating to be able to walk with the energy I felt instead of pretending to drag sluggishly in my attempt to ditch the protest. “Now I can’t do it like that Bo Dudley character, mind you, but I’ll do what I can.”
The thing I remember most about Francesca is her set of reaching and nimble fingers. Her hands were older than she, bony with blue veins pressed through papery skin. But they moved like a pianist, quick and soulful. When her long nails separated sections of my hair and she combed through it with her fingers, I almost curled up like a cat and went back to sleep.